I log in this morning on a whim, and notice I have -15 karma.  I dig around for a bit and find this:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/nsm/open_thread_jul_25_jul_31_2016/ddjm

To be clear, that's a block of four comments, each at -10, for no apparent obvious good reason other than eugine nier has a vendetta against Elo.  I've apparently just been hit as splash damage, since I had the gall to try posting on an Elo comment thread.

I dig a little more, and I find this:

http://lesswrong.com/user/Elo/overview/

That's Elo's page, and I see a pile of discussion-grade posts that are all bulk downvoted below visibility, again for no apparent obvious good reason.

I find myself incredibly disincentivized to post or comment as a result of this.  My feeble amount of karma has taken literally years to build up, and to see sizable fractions of it wiped out any time I step on a eugine nier landmine is bullshit.  Sure, it's silly to value karma, but I value it anyway and if a year of incidental effort can be burned in two days because one guy wants to be an asshole to me, then I'm done here.

This has been going on for months.  Years even.

I understand the staff of LW are pressed for time.  I understand nobody understands how the code works.  I understand that maintaining the site is hard. However, reality is that which does not go away when we close our eyes, and reality does not care:  no matter how difficult the problems are, the fact remains that this sort of thing is abusive and it is actively driving people off the site.

If you value LW, fix this.  Use the force harder, site owners.

On the other hand, if you want LW to turn into another Kuro5hin, then keep doing what you're doing.

Prediction:  50% odds this post will be downvoted below visibility within two days due to eugine, and will basically disappear without trace.

Prediction:  if this isn't dealt with soon, 50% odds I'll stop visiting LW completely other than as an article archive by year end, because there's no goddamned point in trying to use the discussion system.

Visiting Less Wrong after being absent for a while can be a major time sink. The sidebar recent-posts and recent-comments links (which I usually have blocked, but not always; I haven't installed the relevant extensions on the system I'm on yet) draw me into interesting discussions, which frequently link back to other discussions, and so on.

To limit how deep I get drawn in, I try to hold back from reflexively clicking links in comments and posts. Instead I just hover over them (or press and hold on a touchscreen) to view the address, hoping to get a general idea of what they're about and whether I'm familiar with them (and occasionally saving them to a folder if I think I might want them later).

Recently, though, I've noticed that LW is replacing off-site links with indirect links, passed through the domain api.viglink.com. This means I can't just glance at the URL to see where it points; I have to either open it or paste it into the address bar and scroll through it looking for the embedded URL of the actual link. Is it important for it to do that? Is there a way to turn that function off, or a browser extension (preferrably Android-compatible) to reverse it?

(Initially posted about here in the current open thread, but I decided I wanted it to be more visible.)

It seems that if you look at the column on the right of the page, you can see upvotes and downvotes separately for recent posts. The same [n, m] format is displayed for recent comments, but it doesn't seem to actually sync with the score displaying on the comment. This feature only seems available on the sidebar: looking at the actual comment or post doesn't give you this information.

Thanks, whoever did this!

I'm imagining an optional checklist offered if you downvote, with the list possibly including troll, poor spelling/grammar, false, redundant....

For that matter, if an optional checklist for downvotes makes sense, then perhaps there should also be one for upvotes: sensible, informative, funny, caused an update....

I'm imagining a little chart appearing if your cursor is on a karma number, the way the proportions of stars do for amazon reviews.

I don't know how much trouble this would be to program-- I'm just floating the idea.

Apologies since I am almost sure this has been brought up before.  Are there any plans for some sort of LateX or MathML functionality on the site?

Browser is Chrome 12.0.742.122. It doesn't happen on Firefox. "It" is:

• sometimes I can't click on links and eventually I get Chrome's "dead tab" notification
• other times it keeps loading, even though while I wait for it to load I can go to, say, my user page and have it load right away
• twice I've gotten weird graphical bugs on it. Screenshots: 1 2

To reiterate, it only happens on the front page, the one you get when you go to lesswrong.com. Other pages are fine. Perhaps it's the map?